Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax

Brian Roark and Richard Sproat

Description

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice.

The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax

Brian Roark and Richard Sproat

Author Information

Brian E. Roark is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering and the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at Oregon Health & Science University. He has published papers in Computer Speech and Language, Speech Communication, Natural Language Engineering and Computational Linguistics. Richard Sproat is Professor of Linguistics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also holds an appointment at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. His most recent book is A Computational Theory of Writing Systems (CUP, 2000).

Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax

Brian Roark and Richard Sproat

Reviews and Awards

"This book should undoubtedly be of great interest to students and researchers of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics, and natural language processing. The book provides an excellent systematics overivew of the current state-of-the-art of the field. The book includes extensive descriptions of the formal characterization of morphological operations as well as a wide range of grammar formalisms, using multilingual data to illustrate these operations and formalisms wherever necesscary. The theory-minded reader will appreciate the book's insightful discussion on the implications of computational modeling for theories of morphology and models of syntax, while the application-minded reader will appreciate its constant emphasis on the application of the models and
algorithms introduced in practical natural language processing tasks." --Linguist List